Comment

Inasmuch as moral is a kudos of humanity, so is spiritual one of contemplation of the wonders of all that is good, or overwhelming about being alive.

None of us should sell out our minds to claimants of these qualities of human consciousness, since they belong in the realms free of human dominance and are more about harmony and tranquility with ones own existence.

There is nothing to say a religious person cannot summon these senses, or in fact practise accessing them, rather than the stresses and angst the world so regularly foists upon us, but to lay claim to them in the guise of religious scripture as god-speak is a pollution of all they represent and a misappropriation of the mind and emotions to something bound to inflict lasting confusions. The learned minds of innocents are oft left impotent to a wholly healthy route to accurately understanding these qualities due the impostor that religion is. It is as seductive as a bully, taking control of thought and feeling, clearly motivated by power and competition as a way of heightening its own interests upon mass following to rally an army of support.

Essentially religion most usually is a power struggle to control the largest numbers amongst our species in predictable ways. Its remit is not to elevate individual enlightenment but to prevail as an influence of the masses. Innocents who it deliberately, recklessly or predictably (disguised as unintentional by proxy) sets up to fail, due its dogma, are simply necessary collateral damage to its insistence on a system of power and control for en mass support of humans seeking emotional and ritual assurances, as all humans do. Its subjects are not meant to see this, or if they do, to submit to it as a best of alternative evils.

In many ways religion is a good example of knowledge being misappropriated over generations till it learns its way into controlling, with expert precision, any attempts to usurp its dominance by fair means or foul. It is an evolution for power and control over human minds and emotions. In this sense it holds interest for science, since science itself comes under attack by it, or is laid host to its will about which it will not relent. It has in many ways poisoned some humans with kindness since they genuinely believe themselves holding a truth. Any single human is a disposable part in its mechanism, simply there to nurture its existence - that of power by fiction. Until a person sees this, any believer is simply a pawn to delusion and barren rational insights into the life they are living and all that means to those who are part of it. Spirituality therein, is a cut, of part real part fictional nectar that religion manufactures to keep the masses addicted to suckling its drip feed as payment for working its snake oiled machinery.

It is a great sadness, to my heart, that this is the best that most of humanity can do, nay a tragedy of epic proportions.

RDFRS US:
The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.